With the advent of the advanced intelligent network (AIN), it has become possible to rapidly design and introduce many new enhanced telecommunications services that provide added flexibility and convenience in how we use our telephone equipment.
The service logic programs and database schema implementing these new services are typically designed at the service creation environment (SCE). The service creation environment is coupled to a service management system (SMS) which supports the operations, administrations, management, and provisioning (OAM&P) needs of the network. The advanced intelligent network nodes typically includes switches or service switching points (SSPs) coupled to signal transfer points (STPs), which are in turn coupled to service control points (SCPs). The service management system functions as an interface between the service creation environment and the rest of the network nodes as it disseminates the service logic programs and database schema to network nodes for execution. The service control points executes service logic programs which define the services and further store and maintain databases that have data associated with the services. The advanced intelligent network further includes intelligent peripherals, which provide pre-recorded voice announcements, voice synthesis, and other functionalities that generally facilitate interaction with service subscribers and customers. The service management system must also interface with customer care systems to provision services that have been deployed.
Therefore the service management system may be thought of as a peer client management system. The service management system accepts and submit requests to and from clients (network nodes) and manage the information flow between all clients. However, not all the clients or network nodes communicate via the same protocol. Further, because the customer care systems do not operate under any industry standard, the service management system must be able to support various dissimilar client connections.